Two for the Road
At first glance it seems an unlikely pairing: Jill Enfield, a fine-art, editorial and commercial photographer acclaimed for her exquisite hand-colored images, and Annie Griffiths Belt, an award-winning photojournalist and long-time contributor to National Geographic magazine. But it was a collaboration both photographers wanted; the key was finding the right project.
"Annie and I met quite a few years ago," Jill says, "and we talked about how much fun it would be if we could work together. We kept talking over the years, and then, more than a year ago, she called and said she had the perfect project -- the Bartram story."
Bartram, as in William Bartram, has been called one of the first "spiritual naturalists" and was certainly the first naturalist to use the word "sublime" to describe what he saw in the natural world. He is best known for his literate, detailed accounts of his travels in the southeast colonies during the period 1773-1776. Bartram was also an accomplished artist whose drawings were early records of the plant and animal life of the regions he explored. For a time he traveled with Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the Louisiana Territory. Although he is not well known, Bartram explored more of America than any other scientist of his time.
When National Geographic decided to do a story on Bartram, Annie saw it as an opportunity to work with Jill. "When I looked at the proposal," Annie says, "it occurred to me that it was one of those very quiet stories that needed just the right approach; otherwise it could kind of disappear in the magazine. I asked the editor if I could shoot the story, and because Bartram was a painter and artist, I wanted the photographs to complement his work. He was not widely known, and I really wanted people to read the story and learn about him."
Suggesting a "design approach" to the story, Annie showed the editor Bartram's drawings along with examples of infrared photography and hand-colored images. The idea took hold immediately. "Then I told him I had a friend who was a hand-colorist, and I could shoot the images and she could paint them. I showed examples of Jill's work. (I'd [already] called [Jill] and asked if she'd be interested in doing this with me.) The editor said yes and off we went."
Jill has been shooting with infrared film for some 20 years and has been hand-coloring both traditional black-and-white images and black-and-white infrared for over sixteen. The appeal of infrared was immediate: "I loved the beautiful tones and the ethereal look of the images," Jill says.
"And I found that infrared lends itself to hand-painting because the tones lean toward white instead of gray, which allows me more areas to add color to. I don't cover the image when I paint it. I like the image to show through the paint; the paint is transparent. If I want a color to be bright, instead of just putting it on once and covering the image below it, I build up the color in thin layers so the image shows through."
At the time of the assignment Annie had had no experience shooting infrared. "I'd met Jill at a workshop where we both were teaching, and I'd observed her class. It was fascinating to me. I try to regularly throw myself challenges -- I don't like getting too comfortable in any one kind of photography. This year I've had a city story that was all photojournalism, two stories that were all natural history and one that was biography -- the Bartram piece. I do a project every year in black and white, and I'd even like to try different formats."
"I gave Annie an infrared lesson," Jill says, which marked the only time they photographed together. "We went to Bartram's' garden, but I was shooting just for my own reference -- National Geographic wasn't going to use any of my photographs -- while Annie was shooting to see what the film would do.
"You know, the film isn't as mysterious as everybody makes it out to be. Besides, what's important is not what film is in the camera, it's the photographer behind the camera. You can put in any film you want, it's still going to look like your work. When Annie shoots, the result is an Annie Griffiths Belt photograph. When I hand color it, it's both of us."
Although she says infrared film is not a mystery, Jill adds that it is a bit of an experiment. "I wouldn't tell anyone to load a roll in the camera and go shoot a job. I told Annie to go play first. We talked about all the variables -- the time of day, how much sky, where you face; all of that affects the image."
And Annie's take on infrared? "It's a pain in the neck," she says, laughing, "but it's so much fun. It's one of those things that's humbling, because what you see is not what you get, and you're not quite sure what's going to happen. Exposure demands a huge bracket.
"The fun thing for me was I got all kinds of advice from people who shot it, and then to a great extent I ignored the advice and tried things that I was told would never work. I shot with a long telephoto lens when I'd been told you couldn't use long lenses. I shot with very wide lenses. I shot wildlife and did a variety of other things just to see what would happen. I was trying not to limit myself."
Annie's photography took six weeks, spread over the course of a year, and covered five states. "What I tried to do was go to the places Bartram went and find remnants of the wilderness he wrote about. And it was wilderness when he was there in the 1700s. So much is developed now, yet some of the creatures that so fascinated him, the alligators and birds, still exist in remnant populations, reserves and quiet little protected enclaves. I went to those places and tried to give a sense of the wilderness he wandered through. I also photographed at his home and in his garden.
"At National Geographic we're pretty unabashedly conservation-oriented, and one of my goals was to recapture the kind of beauty he saw. By doing so, we encourage people to save it, especially places in Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia, where there's such a rush to develop that it's having an enormous impact on the wildlife and natural resources."
Once Annie and the editors at National Geographic selected the photographs they wanted to use for the article, the images were sent to Jill for painting. "If I felt that painting wouldn't do an image justice, I'd tell them," Jill says. "Editing at the National Geographic is a group effort, and they wanted my feedback."
Ultimately Jill painted 15 images. "Some went back and forth," she says. "They might ask me to bring a skin tone out more. Or say that a flower is the main point of focus [and] can I make it more translucent. I'm a slow painter, and each image takes me, normally, a half-day to a day; then the next day I might go back and look and make some changes. It's almost always a two-day process, but it could take three."
Often Jill's point of reference was a Bartram drawing, but not always. "There are different types of water lilies," she says, "and I'd look them up to find the true color of the one in the photograph. Some images ended up with the true colors, some close but not exact. It was a bit different from how I normally work. On a commercial job, I work toward the real colors; when it's my own work, it doesn't matter what the reality is, it's the feeling I want." This project, she says, was somewhere in between.
"I think our work fit perfectly with the subject," Annie says of the project. "Bartram used words and painting in a romantic, impressionistic way to portray what he was seeing. The point of our story was to interpret what he saw and what he did so many years ago, and I think we were successful."
Says Jill, "We both really wanted to do this. It was creative, fun and exciting. And the pictures are beautiful. I can't wait for comments."
[Note to Reader: The painted photographs accompanying this story are, of course, Jill's; the others are Annie's. In the Portfolio section of this Legends Behind the Lens, we will first post ten of Jill's photographs, followed by ten of Annie's and ten from the Bartram project.]
Out of the Box
Infrared. For anything.
In the Bag
Annie Griffiths Belt typically carries up to six F4 bodies on an overseas assignment. For the Bartram project she took four, working with two at a time while the other two cooled in her air-conditioned car. Not that the cameras can't take the heat -- it's the infrared film that's at risk. If it gets too warm, it'll fog up. "So much of the time I was working in heat," Annie says, "and I had to have the car running with the air conditioning on. As soon as the camera body got hot, I'd put it back in the car and take a cold body out to work with. In South Carolina and Florida it was over a hundred degrees; one day it was 103 and very humid." The film, needless to say, traveled in a cooler.
Annie's favorite lenses are the 20-35mm f/2.8D AF, 50mm f/1.4D, 180mm f/2.8 and 300mm f/2.8D AF-S Nikkors. The film for the project was Kodak's High Speed Infrared, rated at ISO 200, but, as Annie says, "it's a non-committed rating. They say about 200, but once you get that red filter on there, you're down to 50." Annie set the camera for 200 and did "enormous brackets, a quarter-stop to a full stop on either side. I found that it came out close to what 50 ISO would give." Because of the slow speed, she worked with a tripod more than she usually does.
Finally, in addition to sunblock, she carried small copies of William Bartram's paintings. "On a project like this, where you want to see differently and think differently, I'd look at the paintings and try to see how he saw things and try to draw some parallels."
Jill shoots with the N90s. Her favorite lens is the 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6D AF Zoom-Nikkor. She shoots Kodak's High Speed Infrared at a lot of speeds. "I've found you can shoot it from 50 to 1000 ISO and get good results," she says. "Part of the attraction of the film is the range of choices you have. You can make it grainy, smooth, high speed, slow speed." Jill even uses different filters, not just red but yellow and a polarizer -- or no filter at all.
